Top 10 Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Social media is a crucial component for any online marketing strategy. If you’re running your small business website on the WordPress platform, it’s incredibly easy to integrate social. There are hundreds of ready made social media plugins for WordPress to choose from.

Your choice of social media plugins for your WordPress website will depend on which social platforms you use actively, what kind of content you offer on your site, and the best look and placement of social tools that complements your website design. From simple to richly featured, below are some of the best WordPress plugins for social media.

Social Media Plugins for WordPress

Digg Digg

This versatile plugin by Buffer comes with plenty of customization options and integrates with virtually any social media platform. With Digg Digg, you can create either a floating social media bar with left or right scrolling options, or sharing buttons that automatically populate at the top or bottom of each of your blog posts.

Digg Digg can be used with Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr – just about any social channels you might use. Facebook options include both Like and Share, and “lazy loading” helps you cut down on load times for your website.

Flare

Simple and eye-catching, the Flare plugin not only gives you customizable share buttons, but also lets you create and display a Follow Me widget, so your visitors can one-click follow your social media channels right from your website.

The plugin is compatible with major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and more. You can customize the appearance of the buttons, and place the share bar at the top or bottom of posts, or to the left and right of your pages. The left and right options scroll down the page with viewers, and auto-hide when not in use.

ShareThis

With great customization, tons of features, and more than 120 supported social media platforms, ShareThis is one of the popular social media plugins for WordPress that’s been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. This plugin tool offers more than social buttons, which come in the form of a Hovering Bar that can be displayed on the right or left side of your pages, with counters and your choice of small or large buttons.

In addition, ShareThis has built-in social analytics, a CopyNShare widget that helps you track shares when your content is copied and pasted, and more.

Share Buttons by AddThis

One of the most popular and recognizable social media plugins for WordPress, AddThis Share Buttons let you integrate with more than 330 social platforms and bookmarking sites, as well as email sharing. While there isn’t an option for a floating sidebar, the plugin gives you plenty of layout choices – and you can also get free analytics when you create an AddThis account.

Floating Social Media Icon

Highly rated and popular, the Floating Social Media Icon plugin gives you a customizable, configurable social bar that flies onto the screen and scrolls along with visitors. You can also disable floating and set up static icons with this plugin.

Floating Social Media Icon gives you more than 20 different icon styles to choose from, so you can match the themes and styles of your website. It also supports multiple widgets, so you can display various social media buttons separately on your pages.

Social Media Feather

Lightweight yet powerful, Social Media Feather is a simple, high-performing social plugin that keeps speeds up and load times down by not using JavaScript. The buttons have a clean, modern look, and you can customize the appearance with social icons skins.

This plugin supports shortcodes, and is currently the only social sharing plugin that supports Retina and high-resolution displays used by mobile devices like the iPad 5.

Slick Social Sharing Buttons

If you’re looking for a social media plugin for WordPress that’s easy to implement and comes with plenty of options, try Slick Social Sharing Buttons. This plugin lets you customize button types, specify which pages and posts to display social sharing on, and choose from either a floating or slide-out share bar. You can also customize location, direction, floating speed, animation speed and more.

Slick Social Sharing Buttons supports shortcodes, and gives you a social analytics dashboard to help you track your sharing activity.

Social Media Widget

With a long list of supported social platforms, including email and RSS, and some fun and interesting customizations, Social Media Widget is an easy-to-use plugin that creates a sidebar widget for social sharing, with links that open a separate tab or window when clicked.

Social Media Widget offers three icon sizes, four icon styles (Web 2.0, Sketch, Heart and Cutout), and four animation types to make your social media buttons stand out on the page.

Shareaholic

The feature-rich, powerful Shareaholic offers more than social sharing. With a stated aim to help you get readers to “actually discover and submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites,” this plugin supports Facebook (both Like and Send), Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and other major social platforms, with share counters for many of them.

In addition, Shareaholic comes with Classic Bookmarks, a Recommendations & Related Content tool, built-in Social Analytics, and official support for Google’s URL shortener as well as Google Analytics.

Share Buttons by AddToAny

Offering support for more than 100 social sites in 19 languages, AddToAny Share Buttons is one of the most popular social media plugins for WordPress with almost 3 million downloads. It’s easy to customize and fully featured, and supports both shares and interactive clicks – including Facebook Likes, a Tweet button for Twitter, a “Pin It” button for Pinterest, a +1 button for Google+ and more.

Bookmarking and email buttons integrate with the most popular email services (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook / Hotmail, AOL, and nearly every Web-based or desktop email program).

You can customize the appearance and position of the AddToAny share bar, and integrate with Google Analytics to make the most of your social marketing.

BONUS: Microblog Poster

A different kind of social plugin, Microblog Poster lets you automatically push your WordPress blog content to various social media platforms. This plugin currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Delicious and more. It also supports shortcodes and multiple accounts on the same platform.

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for Chamber of Commerce. Chamber specializes in helping SMB's grow their business on the Web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide. Megan specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources and provides advice through her column on the Chamber blog.

I am a fan of Floating social media icon. That’s because I am loving the icon designs. It makes my blog seem like it has custom icons. I have also used AddThis as it allows people to share my posts across different platforms.

This post came in good timing. I have been thinking of adding a social media sharing plugin for my business site in Swedish. I am using the eleven40 theme on Genesis Framework. Any suggestion on which plugin will fit this template the best?

Really nice article. Actually I was searching for social media sharing plugin for my wordpress blog and came across your site. Let me try out listed plugins one by one. So I can work around and choose one of best suitable for my blog.

This looks like a great list! My partner and I are in the business of building WordPress business sites for others. We also encourage our customers and blog readers to make sure to they are providing content worth sharing, tweeting about, bookmarking, etc. We will definitely bookmark this post and share it with our customers.

I would like to suggest another one, for those who are using the authorship markup. I recently developed the following “most shared plugin” that imports the articles you have authored, and display the best ones, even if they have been published outside your blog (Most Shared Articles For WordPress : http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordiz-most-shared-articles-for-authors ).

If you have some time to give it a try, do not hesitate to drop me some feedback and suggestions since I am always trying to make it better.

Hi, Megan, Thanks for this awesome list of social sharing plugin. I am currently using Digg Digg, Though I have experience some delay in loading of the icons. So, Just looking for alternative. Thank you very much.

Thank you Megan for your list – very informative and helpful as I am searching for an easy but rich sharing plug in. However you didn’t state which one you would recommend!? be interested to hear that also! Thank you!

There is also a super handy popup plugin for WordPress that can seriously help some of your post to go viral.. it is called “Go Viral” I think is what it was called “Go Viral Popup Plugin” I think it is by Riviton or something like that, but I have seen this on ViralDoza, SFTimes.co, and many others. If you use WordPress and want your stuff to go viral, that plugin will work wonders…

I am looking for a plugin that can show Twitter , facebook , Google Plus Follow Button as popup . I tried Social Popup Plugin to enable this to my blog but it is not working for me . I want a plugin that show all social site at once . Let me know any best plugin for me

Excellent write-up on some of the top social sharing plug-ins for WordPress. I’ve been using one-click like,share,tweet because of it’s light-weight set-up though will be giving Social media Feather a try base on your recommendations. (hopefully will come back here to post my opinions)

Looking at a bunch of comments that acclaim Flare as their favourite social sharing plugin, it may be worth noting that Flare is no longer being updated as a WordPress plug-in so you may want to consider replacing it on the list. According to their WP description page they are working on a universal social sharing tool (much like ADDthis I suppose) now.

Can anyone recommend the absolute best out of this list of 10? I know it can be really subjective. Thanks.

Great list! My personal favorite is Shareaholic – I just find it very easy to use and “pretty.” I have been looking for a good floating social share plugin and thanks to your list, Flare looks like a winner! Thanks.

I am looking for a way to share my comments on social media to my blog. So a plugin that might import my best Quora (or G+, FB, etc) answers to my site.
I do far more soical answering than posting to my blog. this might be a way to keep my blog updates if it imported them as something that was readable by search engines.

I believe Storify has an embed function but it an image of your collected comments on Storify, so Google is unable to read it. It is also difficult to find all my answers.

The wonder I need performed is to have the Question and the Comment inported into my blog in a way that will allow Google to read it as, I assume, text.

I have the above store which is a simple Amazon affiliate store. Does anyone know of a plugin that will allow me to share specific item from my store ? I can share the site as a whole or share posts from the blog section but say I want to Tweet a fishing rod or post a Reel etc on Facebook my social icons don’t allow me to do that.

Hello !
Megan it’s the first time that I landed on my blog. The plugins that are used for social sharing purposes introduced by here are really awesome. I prefer Digg Digg and Flare much. How ever I think jetpack can also be used for social sharing.
Really enjoyed reading your post from top to bottom. Thanks for sharing !

Having installed jetpack and using publicize the dilemma for me is whether I should add another plugin or not. Now I am using Add to Any which is kinda good but a duplication for me. Lets see, I should take a call soon.
Very informative post, thanks

We develop new social media sharing with interesting features – it automatically display sharing buttons for those social networks, where visitor registered and logged in. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and 100+ more social networks and bookmark services available. Also if you have Google Analytics tracking code on pages, it will automatically receive tracking notifications for each visitor registered in social network or share button pressed. Translated to 20+ languages.

Nice tips. But how about an automatic tools that can submit to all social networks platforms once?
For exemple, I have an account on digg, techonrati, diggit, faves etc… and i want (with a click) to submit an url to all this networks. how about this?

Hey Megan, have you seen Social Warfare social sharing plugin yet?
It is all of these rolled into one. Custom pins, custom text for Tweets, click to tweet, popular posts based on social share counts. It is my new favorite and it was just launched a week or so ago.
It is made by Warfare Plugins.

I use ShareAHolic a lot as it is easy to configure. But recently there’s a new plugin called Easy Social Button which you need to check it out. Very detailed and I seen many sites using it. Not promoting it but just saying (that you may add or try)

Nice list ! Thank you.
But I was wondering, especially for Digdig as it is not updated since 3.5.2 and if I am correct we are now at 4.1 or something, do you guys still recommand it?
I tried it and nothing shows up. I thought it was maybe becaue of my theme, but I am not so sure now.

Thanks for the awesome article! Digg Digg (and Buffer itself, for that matter) is awesome!

I also wanted to let you know about a new plugin I just released, called WP Social Media Slider. It offers a way to display Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts on your website in a responsive slider.

Earlier I was using Flare for a long time but now I switched to Share this and I found it better as it offers more customizations and is even better bang for buck.Between other options that you mentioned are also noteworthy.

AddToAny. Hands down, the “Share Buttons by AddToAny” plugin is the best one available for WordPress. I have tried all of them above!

The AddToAny plugin updates are perfect, it’s only gotten better. Yet the plugin keeps a very high level of quality (not like so many of the other social media plugins. Shareaholic. ShareThis, AddThis have gone completely bonkers in their updates). AddToAny just works and their documentation is stupendous!

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